"Design Patterns" in Ruby

The Gang of Four book was actually 2 books: a nomenclature describing common software problems and a recipe book for solutions. The vocabulary they defined is still useful. The recipes are a disaster! Dynamic languages (like Groovy and Ruby) have powerful meta-programming facilities far beyond statically typed languages. It turns out that many of the structural design patterns in the Gang of Four book and beyond are much easier to solve with meta-programming. This session compares and contrasts the “traditional” approach of design patterns with a more nuanced meta-programming approach. Using language features creates cleaner abstractions with fewer lines of code and little or no additional structure. This session shows one of the many reasons that dynamic languages are such a hot topic.

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Neal Ford

ThoughtWorks

Neal Ford is a senior application architect at *Thought*Works, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. He is the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, courseware, video/DVD presentations, author of 3 books, including Art of Java Web Development (Manning 2003), and editor/contributor for the 2006 and 2007 editions of the No Fluff, Just Stuff Anthology (Pragmatic Press). He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at numerous developers’ conferences worldwide. Check out his web site at www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.